Mailmerge via Google Sheets: multiline cell content

Question

I'm trying to create a batch of email messages using data from a Google Sheets.

The Sheets has these columns: name, email address, message

I tried 2 google Add-ons: Yet Another Mail Merge (uses Gmail for the mail composition) and Merge by Mailchimp (uses Google Docs for the mail composition).

With both, the same issue occurs: the generated emails do not respect the linebreaks, and so the message is just one big chunk of text, aweful to read at.

Do you know of a way to solve this?

I've tried this, and it almost worked (with YAMM, it did not work with MbM): have a "before" column with <pre> as value and another "after" column with </pre> as value.

And then, in the mailmerge, inject <<before>> <<comments>> <<after>>

But that create another problem: many emails have their body trimmed for some strange reason. I'd rather solve this inside Google Sheets if possible.

Answer 1

You can use Yet Another Mail Merge to produce what appears to be line breaks by breaking up the message content into different columns.

Wherever you need to see a line break, insert a column with a Break # header. The cells below the header in that column should be blank.

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1. In Google Sheets for instance, your columns might end up looking like this:

   Email Address, P1, Break 1, P2, ​Break 2, P3, ​Break 3 and P4

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2. In Gmail, compose the draft message like this. Also, make sure the font size for the breaks is set to small.

   

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3. Send yourself a test to verify. Here's the result I got with this configuration.